I am appreciating Ruth Solie’s Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations for its creative source material. I have read two of Solie’s essays. The first essay used Victorian journalism and the second utilized teenage girls’ diaries. In “Music in a Victorian Mirror: Macmillan’s Magazine in the Grove Years,” Solie writes, “I attempt to find a window onto the meanings that music held in English Victorian culture, to understand how musical ideas and information, as well as feelings and attitudes toward music, may permeate a culture…”[1] Through this article I am beginning to understand how much the Victorians valued the arts. Poetry and creative writing a la Charles Dickens permeated their magazines. Solie deduces that this rise in interest in the arts is a result of industrialization and the growing middle class. It is interesting to me that music began in the church, served the elite, and now, music is finally for the people. If it weren’t for the Victorian Era, I might not have a job as a conductor, since amateur choral societies arose from music’s newfound availability to the public. As intelligent and well learned as people were when it came to Handel and Mendelssohn, people were hesitant to accept the music “of the future,”[2] or really anything “of the future.” Solie explains, “The coinage evidently captured the Victorian imagination, immersed as it was in the sense of an ongoing developmental stream of history and an intense concern as to where that stream would lead…”[3] It’s clear that people of the Victorian Era don’t want music to be challenging and progressive because everything else in their lives is already challenging enough. Music should be an escape from life’s fast pace. It seems that in the world I live in we have accepted that music will ever evolve, as does everything else. The way we cope with change, however, is through the green movement (buy local, and you are returning to your hunter-gatherer roots) and alternative forms of healing like yoga, acupuncture, and massage. I am sure there are other trends as well, but these trends in particular appeal to the middle and upper classes, the same kinds of people who one hundred and fifty years ago would be escaping life’s troubles through the next Great Expectations installment in a London magazine or through singing the cathartic and beautiful “He that shall ensure to the end” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah in their local choral society.
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